Tag: extraterrestrial life

Planets, planets everywhere

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2013/01/Planets-Everywhere.mp3[/podcast] You don’t have to be very old to remember a time when we didn’t know if there were any planets anywhere else in the universe beyond those in our own solar system. Oh, sure, scientists and science fiction writers had long assumed these extrasolar planets existed, but the stars were so distant it seemed …

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Seeking for life in all the wrong places

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2012/06/Seeking-for-LIfe-in-all-the-Wrong-Places.mp3[/podcast] “It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it,” was never actually said in the original series of Star Trek (in fact, it’s from The Firm’s popular parody song “Star Trekkin’”), but it still sums up the notion that we might not recognize extraterrestrial life when first we encounter it because it’s so different …

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Paging all those "Face on Mars" believers…

…there’s a new formation for you to sink your conspiritorially minded teeth into: a “doorway” in an unusually shaped mountain on the Red Planet. (That’s it at left.) (Via Futurismic.)

Paging all those "Face on Mars" believers…

…there’s a new formation for you to sink your conspiritorially minded teeth into: a “doorway” in an unusually shaped mountain on the Red Planet. (That’s it at left.) (Via Futurismic.)

Scientists do the work of SF writers…

…and make a list of some of the planets that may exist in other solar systems. I’ve posted about it at Futurismic. (Rather than copy my posts from there here, from now on I’ll just make a note when I post something over there–apparently the searchbots and webspiders don’t like duplicate content.)

No puddles now…

…but Mars may once have been covered by ocean.

No puddles on Mars

That story I blogged about postulating possible puddles on Mars? Fuhgeddaboutit. Turns out the photo in question comes from the side of a crater–on terrain too steeply sloped for puddles to be possible. So neither the depressions in the photo, nor the startling hypothesis put forward concerning them, hold water. Too bad!

Does a hidden ocean of liquid water lurk beneath Titan’s surface?

Maybe. And if so, it could harbor life.

Puddles on Mars?

Is this a picture of puddles on Mars? UPDATE: No, it isn’t. Turns out the terrain in question is on a slope too steep to hold water…something the researchers somehow failed to notice.

Planets, planets everywhere

It’s been about five years since I last wrote about the search for extrasolar planets–that is, planets orbiting other stars. As I noted then, the idea that the universe is full of planets has been so firmly established in our minds by science fiction that it’s amazing to realize that we only found the first …

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Why am I confident the universe is teeming with life?

Because we keep finding it on Earth in even the most apparently inhospitable places…like the Rancho La Brea tar pits.

What a setting for a science fiction story!

A Neptune-sized planet made of hot ice and shrouded with steam, orbiting a star just 30 light years away. More important than its fictional possibilities, of course, is the fact that it seems to have a lot of water, albeit it in ultra-dense, ultra-hot solid form. A little further out from its sun, and it …

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